The Girl Who Leapt
by bandofthree
Summary: Merrill, lost among infinite universes. Part 3 of the Travelers Through Space-time series


One moment Merrill was sinking beneath the silt at the bottom of a shallow pond, fox-faced mask affixed to her face and emerald party gown billowing inky in the dark water. The next she was coughing up the stringy ghosts of lily roots on the floor of an unfamiliar forest of round trees.

Merrill hiked up her robes, party dress replaced with light practicality, and crept to the top of the nearest ridge. Before her spread an unfamiliar world peppered with squat, colossally spherical trees. Double suns hung on the horizon. The fat, leathery mounds of this world's trees sprouted a tuft of red leaves at the peak of their domes. Their leaves, such as they were, flapped in a light sulphurous breeze.

Some ways down the valley—and it _is_ a valley, she realized, a great big bowl in a near-endless expanse of rolling beige hills—Merrill spied a settlement perched on the edge of a dry lake bed. She wound among the strange trees, sensible shoes crunching in the brief, rough grass.

Whatever it was Merrill searched for this certainly wasn't it. Lovely as this bright world might have been in all of its infernal roundness, it didn't feel at all like home. Home had edges at the very least, she was certain. Sharp ones.

The next port hummed in the distance. Its lullaby song stood up the hairs on the back of her neck, a rising-falling-all-singing-all-dancing doorway to someplace else, calling her name.

_It has to be there._

She reached the border of the settlement. The suns beat hot on her dark head. The buildings were not made of clay as she had first thought but of the husks of the round trees, hollowed out and filled again with this world's approximation of humanity.

The port sang louder here, pricked at her eardrums with more insistent cries. Merrill shook her head, trying to clear the sound. It eluded her grasp like eel skin, slipping slick and pliable between her fingers.

No bother. She would be gone soon enough.

Her boots trailed thin impressions in the desiccated silt. She darted from structure to structure, ducking past dark doorways and beneath keyhole windows. Neither a murmur nor a cough broke the silence in the town. There was nothing save the tremulous whining of the port. Merrill let herself be dragged toward it.

_Ah, there it is._

There was nothing to distinguish it, no, but the port was certainly _there_. It vibrated the halo of air surrounding it with the force of its singing. Merrill was surprised—always surprised, frankly—that the locals, wherever they were, didn't seem to know the portal was there. But they never did know, never did hear the song nor see the pin prick slip of dead pixel space just hanging out there like a banner in the breeze. Not in any town she had visited, not on any of the thousand worlds she had run through.

This particular port was inconveniently located some 10 feet off the hard-packed ground, surrounded by naught but open air. They often were, truth be told, often someplace high or someplace very, very low, fenced by danger and misadventure. But always _there_. She just needed to follow the song.

Merrill checked to be certain the way was clear and sprinted across the town's square, clambering up the high dome of its central building. The climb challenged her but the thin, lengthy fingers of this world made finding handholds in the divots and whorls of wood simple enough.

In a few moments she reached the zenith. Shouting erupted below, followed by the babel of shattering dishware. Merrill primed to leap. Just before she pushed off the roof, a sharp, ragged face peeked from the doorway. His eyes are wide with fright, their whites stark against his skin.

Merrill caught his eye as she leapt and laughed, loud and wild.

"See you on the other side, Anders!"

She disappeared.

The fall: slow at first, like an overturning rowboat. You're not quite sure it will really tip until suddenly you're sopping wet and an oar is crashing about your skull. Then: the sound of silk sliding on glass, of rending.

_This will be the one._

Always Merrill clung to the same hope before falling through, folded up her solitary wish and tucked it against her solar plexus as the air came quick with the approaching ground. A prayer to the all-being energy of the universes that the sun at her destination would be singular, would shine with the right light, that the pines would be tall and the mountain peaks flush with the sky. Perhaps the people would move in an ambling way, turn to her with broad gestures and broader smiles of recognition, welcome, felicity. Perhaps the other side would be home. _Yes_.

Perhaps.

A bullet whipped into the face of the wall behind her head. Her ears rang, fell momentarily deaf on the left side. Merrill looked down and found a rifle in her hands. The dirt across her boots was ochre-colored and the sun almost right, but—

Merrill spied the logo affixed to the arm of the person next to her. TDF. Talos Defense Force. _Oh, hell. Mars, then._ She inspected her rifle. _Old Mars. Mars of 2300._

She had been here once before. Not the same Mars, a different nexus, a Mars of 2744. One of the Mars' where the Talos Group quashed the burgeoning belt miners rebellion by threatening, then killing, their families in the Mariner Valleys dome cities. The rebellion collapsed swiftly after that. Trade between Earth, Mars, and the Outer Colonies resumed shortly thereafter. The whole shebang only cost a couple hundred thousand lives, mere pennies among the wealth of human capital in the Local System.

Merrill snorted. Of course, it had to figure she'd found her way back to Mars. For reasons as innumerable as the universes abutting the one she knew as "home," Mars was a flashpoint in their shared history, a place they could always find each other.

Back against the low wall, she peeked down the line of soldiers beside her. A lot of bodies. Much too many bodies. Some slumped over, inert, their limbplants blinking. The TDF wasn't doing so hot after all. She was sorely tempted to stick around just to see what would happen.

Mars so rarely lost.

But no, this certainly wasn't home. The sun and the dirt were close enough, but her body was never this light, her step never quite so quick. Home was, as always, elsewhere.

A thick-fingered hand reached around the wall and hauled her out it by the neck of her suit. Merrill kicked like a wild cat, all flying spit and precision strike limbs. Her assailant grunted, shoved her off.

"Maker, Merrill, I thought you were the enemy. I nearly shot you!" He coughed bloody into his hand, then spit. A vivid globule landed on Merrill's boot. His bearing captured her: an easy grace; eyes a storm-churned ocean blue framed by deep crows feet; a high, peaked brow and the long-limbed frame of a low-grav native.

"Creators, Seb!" She laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. "I thought you were the MILF."

"Maker, no, Liberation Front fools. Don't give a care what a work stoppage might do to the Titan colonies. No—" He dragged her through the open and pulled her around the corner of an oxygenation unit, then enfolded her in a lung crushing hug. "I haven't seen one of you in ages, Merrill. When did you come through?"

She shook him off with a quick squeeze and straightened her helmet. "Moments ago. Can't stay, just passing through."

"'Course, 'course." He squeezed her hand. She could just feel the press through her thick glove. "It's really good to see you," he said.

Merrill smiled broadly, openly. She could never not smile for him, even if this particular copy stood on the wrong side of history. "Hey," she started, suddenly serious. "Keep a keen eye out. The TDF may not win this one." He raised an eyebrow. "I don't mean to alarm you, but the last Mars I visited, the TDF controlled the entire inner system. This looks significantly dicier."

Sebastian shrugged. Even burdened with body armor as he was, his arms looked gangly, his face gaunt. "The TDF will not stand for their revolt. We have superior firepower, more boots on the ground—"

"—And the miners have nothing to lose that you haven't already taken from them. When was the last time you died, Seb?"

His face crumpled. "Blast, Merrill. An age. I don't know."

"And what happened?"

"I dragged some poor man out of 16th century Scotland."

"Would you have enjoyed that, do you think?"

"I take your point. Keen eye. Maker."

"The man's got nothing to do with it." Merrill winked, shouldering her rifle. "See you on the other side, Seb."

He knocked his helmet against hers. Her skull rattled in the hardened plastic, and she smiled.

As Merrill snuck along a line of OU tubing, Sebastian called out to her. "Where is it, anyway?" She indicated a point near the end of the wall just ahead of them, a few feet off the ground near the middle of the battlefield, then waved him off.

Merrill's ears popped with the soft _hsss_ of air that follows a suit rupture. Sticky warmth spread down her side. She seized, toppled in the dust. Blood pooled inside her suit.

"Merrill!" Sebastian screamed. She struggled to breathe, waved at him not to follow. If she could just crawl to the port—

"Where did they get armor piercing bullets?" Sebastian yelled to a blurring figure in the background. It sounded to Merrill as if his voice bubbled up from the bottom of a well.

Pain suffused her limbs. Fiery quicksilver sluiced through her veins. She resigned herself to the ground, unable to drag herself any further, and bled slowly into the dust. Foamy blood burbled from her mouth and she coughed, spattering the clear plastic of her visor in a constellation of red.

Merrill chuckled, low and liquid. _Looks like Andromeda. The chained lady. Ah, that's a good one. I'll have to tell Anders._ Blood dribbled down her chin. Pain was the boundary and the beginning. Pain was everything.

_Focus, Merrill. Where's the portal?_

She reached for the hum, stretching her fingers. They scrabbled in the dirt it was still many feet from her grasp. She laid down her head and attended to the sound of her own low thrum of heartbeat as it drained away.

Merrill's back bucked in a flash of electricity and with a jerk she was folded, slipped, fell fingertip first through the soap bubble-thin wall between universes.

She burst out of a doorway on the other side. A coffee shop bathroom flew past her, peeling maroon paint on the wall. The man at the front of the line caught her wrist before she tumbled to the floor. Merrill looked up and found him, the tall man with the carefully-combed auburn hair and high, imperious forehead. It was Sebastian. It was one of them. He had found her.

She dragged him outside onto the cafe's narrow sidewalk and yelled in a half whisper. "I was the portal that time! It was me! How on Earth did that happen?"

He backed away. "Pardon, do I know you?" He released Merrill's wrist, self-conscious, and pushed his glasses up his nose with his middle finger. It had been ages since she had seen him like this, so near to the way she first met him a hundred thousand turns ago.

"Miss?" He interrupted her memories.

Merrill grasped at his sleeve. "It was _me_. I didn't have to find it. I created it. I felt it spring from nothing and dropped through running to the other side, here, wherever here is, and I'm alive! I was shot and I thought for sure I would die this time and I'm alive and _I was the portal!"_ She shook him breathlessly. "Can you believe it, Seb?"

He looked at her, wonder in his voice now. "Who are you?"

"Creators, have you met him yet?" She clasped his hand in hers. "Anders? The blonde one? Do you know him?"

"Who—," he said, halting, then realized, "—the barista? I don't know what you're talking about. I mean, he doesn't even know my name." Merrill pulled him down and planted a quick kiss on his cheek. She began to laugh. "Seb, you have no idea what a surprise you're in for. I have to go."

She released him and flew down the sidewalk, still laughing. She wove among wrought iron tables and empty chairs, pushed past a herd of slow-walking tourists. The next portal hummed beyond her, its whispers and wails braided through the clatter of cobblestones beneath her short heels.

She leapt off a high bridge above rows of train tracks. The wind whipped her cropped hair in a frenzy. She winked away into nothingness moments before crashing on the tracks below, barely a whisper following her departure.

Merrill opened her eyes at the bottom of a bathtub. She rose, sputtering, and tripped across the cracked bathroom tiles to the unlocked door.

"Is that you?" Anders called from beyond the threshold.

She stumbled into the living room, soaked through and dripping on the balding carpet.

They sat side by side on a long sofa. Sebastian's hair was pulled back in a sloppy bun and thin wire glasses perched on the edge of his nose. Anders pecked at the crossword on his datapad.

"You'll never guess who I just met." Merrill removed one boot and left it where she stood. "Seb, before he meets you." She pointed at Anders with the other boot. Water sprinkled the carpet. She stripped off her thin shirt and left it on the floor.

Anders chuckled, nearly spilling the tea balanced on his knee. His long hair hung lank at his shoulders. "Did he seem confused?"

Merrill grinned. "Awfully so, I'm afraid." She showed uneven teeth, imagining them again: two young men bound together through countless 'heres', scattered across an infinite sea of 'theres'. Always in slow orbit, one about the other, circling center. Circling her.

Sebastian dug his long toes under Anders' behind and wiggled them. He yelped and they laughed. "Good for him, " Sebastian said.

Merrill padded through the pneumatic door to their small backyard. She peeled off her pants, her socks, and laid herself naked in the sun-warmed grass. A flier passed overhead, then another. They looked bulbous here, all rounded edges and sleek, low domes.

Anders and Sebastian leaned into each other. Anders shrugged. Months had passed since either of them had seen sight of one of her. The last one came crashing through the kitchen ceiling with a yelp and a knife in her shoulder, face covered in blood. She'd limped into the bathroom and they'd heard the water run.

Later they opened the door, Anders peeking from behind Sebastian's shoulder, and found that Merrill had disappeared. A clean knife lay at the bottom of a tub full of pink water. Not even a ripple marred its surface.

They had learned long ago there wasn't any use in asking where or when. Merrill never knew what the others were doing and hardly ever stayed more than an hour. There had been that one version of Merrill who had slept on the couch for three months with a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a datapad in an indecipherable script in the other, until one day they had come home with groceries and that Merrill was gone, too.

They didn't ask why or when anymore, just cleaned up the messes and made sure the tub was always full so she wouldn't have to come through the kitchen ceiling. A previous Merrill told them it was a simpler thing to slip across the threshold of universes between bodies of water or through the open air. There was a lubricious quality to air and water not shared by rock, steel, or fire, she said. Not a roar but a murmur answered in kind, and _easier_, somehow, to talk to.

Merrill turned over, nose deep in the manicured grass, and inhaled the last dregs of that world's summer. The sun through the trees above painted a mural on her back. Their blade-shaped shadows skittered across the knobs of her spine.

That world resembled home. The sun was right, though the season was wrong. The daylit moon was a swath of dazzling jigsaw pieces across the sky and that _certainly_ wasn't right. No, home had just the one moon, a rhyme nested in the rhythm of sky.

The comfort of that world, that pair, was a near miss: close enough to provoke an echo, a faded image reproduced countless times until the details fuzzed at the edges but the familiar shapes remained. Close enough to pause and smell the grass before falling once again through the mirror.

She centered the ache in her chest, allowed her loss and rage at everything's impossible distance to grab handholds in her bones.

A glittering portal opened beneath her.

She fell.


End file.
